First opened Wednesday, August 18, 2010
辞書
じしょ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
dictionary
Jisho “dictionary” repurposes an older jisho meaning “letter of resignation”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
辞書で調べます。
I will look it up in the dictionary.
それは辞書だよ。
It's a dictionary.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “A repurposing of older term 辞書 (jisho, “letter of resignation”) (see below), based on a reanalysis of the constituent characters 辞 (ji, “resignation, quitting; word”) + 書 (sho, “writing, record, document, book”). Influenced by Middle Chinese-derived term 辞典 (jiten, “dictionary”), wherein the 辞 character expresses the meaning word from Middle Chinese 辭 /辞 (zi), instead of the meaning resignation or quitting from Middle Chinese 辤 (zi). Note that both of these older character forms were later conflated in both Japanese and Chinese into the simplified version 辞, with the word meaning becoming dominant in Chinese.”
- Hedged“First appearance in Japanese with the dictionary sense might be the 1595 publication by the Jesuits of the 羅葡日辞書 (Ra-Ho-Nichi Jisho, “Latin-Portuguese-Japanese Dictionary”), alternate title Dictionarium Latino Lusitanicum, ac Iaponicum.”
- Hedged“Compare modern Mandarin 辭書 /辞书 (císhū, “dictionary, lexicon”), possibly reborrowed from or otherwise influenced by the Japanese.”
- “From Middle Chinese compound 辤書 /辤书 (zi syo, literally “quit + writing”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 辞書 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 辞書 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not じしょ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じそ
- “The 直音表記 (chokuon hyōki, literally “straight-sound spelling”) of jisho above. Most common from the Heian through the Muromachi periods.”
- “It is unclear if the pronunciation itself also shifted, or just the spelling.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.